Lavabit To Release Code As Open Source, As It Creates Dark Mail Alliance To Create Even More Secure Email

from the it's-needed dept

This whole morning, while all these stories of the NSA hacking directly into Google and Yahoo's network have been popping up, I've been at the Inbox Love conference, all about the future of email. The "keynote" that just concluded, was Ladar Levison from Lavabit (with an assist from Mike Janke from Silent Circle), talking about the just announced Dark Mail Alliance, between Lavabit and Silent Circle -- the other "security" focused communications company who shut down its email offering after Lavabit was forced to shut down. Levison joked that they went with "Dark Mail" because "Black Mail" might have negative connotations. Perhaps just as interesting, Levison is going to be releasing the Lavabit source code (and doing a Kickstarter project to support this), with the hope that many others can set up their own secure email using Lavabit's code, combined with the new Dark Mail Alliance secure technology which will be available next year.

As noted, the Alliance is working on trying to create truly secure and surveillance-proof email. Of course, nothing is ever 100% surveillance proof -- and both members of the alliance have previously claimed that it was almost impossible to do surveillance-proof email. However, they're claiming they've had a "breakthrough" that will help.

The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders—inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it will automatically deploy peer-to-peer encryption, so that users of the Dark Mail technology will be able to communicate securely. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP, will apply to both content and metadata of the message and attachments. And the secret keys generated to encrypt the communications will be ephemeral, meaning they are deleted after each exchange of messages.

For the NSA and similar surveillance agencies across the world, it will sound like a nightmare. The technology will thwart attempts to sift emails directly from Internet cables as part of so-called “upstream” collection programs and limit the ability to collect messages directly from Internet companies through court orders. Covertly monitoring encrypted Dark Mail emails would likely have to be done by deploying Trojan spyware on a targeted user. If every email provider in the world adopted this technology for all their users, it would render dragnet interception of email messages and email metadata virtually impossible.

Importantly, they're not asking everyone to just trust them to be secure -- even though both companies have the right pedigree to deserve some level of trust. Instead, they're going to release the source code for public scrutiny and audits, and they're hoping that other email providers will join the alliance.

At the conference, Levison recounted much of what's happened over the last few months (with quite a bit of humor), joking about how he tried to be "nice" in giving the feds Lavabit's private keys printed out, by noting that he included line numbers to help (leaving unsaid that this would make OCR'ing the keys even more difficult). He also admitted that giving them the paper version was really just a way to buy time to shut down Lavabit.

Janke came up on stage to talk about the importance of changing the 40-year-old architecture of email, because it's just not designed for secure communications. The hope is that as many other email providers as possible will join the Alliance and that this new setup becomes the de facto standard for end-to-end secure email, which is where Levison's open sourcing of his code gets more interesting. In theory, if it all works out, it could be a lot easier for lots of companies to set up their own "dark mail" email providers.

Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.

Ban encryption

This will just provide more reason for the NSA/Congress to outlaw (or criminalize) encryption code. The fact that this would likely destroy the Internet and kill off some of the US's largest companies is of little concern to the NSA and their mouthpieces.

I'm loving this. I knew that after all the revelations it would make a lot of developers and cryptographers pissed off with the NSA and will try to find solutions against their mass surveillance. I think we're going to see a lot more great stuff like this in the future.

Couldn't make Google very happy, either!

BUT so long as the masses of dolts go along with Google and nearly every other email "service" spying on them, this isn't going to bother NSA. -- Heck, waving flags that say "I'm hiding something!" is actually of high value to spies: it's the needle popping out of the haystack.So long as "The Market" (if not NSA directly) rewards Google for spying, do you expect it to do LESS of it?

"Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy"

well we wouldn't want that.

- I have always thought of this as a technical problem. It won't be solved by new laws or new oversight or Politicians. Its simply a set of technical problems we will address, part of the reason its been so ignored is because of laziness. I think this will give us our edge back and we will be creating secure mail/messaging/P2P websites w/no traditional DNS lots of good stuff in the pipe.

Re:

"I have always thought of this as a technical problem. It won't be solved by new laws or new oversight or Politicians."_______________________________

I agree with you, although we need both. There must be a legal prohibition on certain activities as well (to provide accountability), but having tech-minded folks applying their skills to engineered solutions is essential as well.

As it ever is

Coders and decrypters have been going back and forth since the middle ages and it will continue forever.

Although the NSA won't be happy, they would be naive to assume there would be no reaction. It does put the NSA's reaction in a different context, although it was embarrassing and the terrorist's a red herring, the exposure of wide spread email monitoring will impact the ease at which they spy as programs such as dark mail are developed.

Re: As a bonus...

Since every message goes between two boxes, not hundreds on a mailing list, then spam costs the sender more for each added recipient, both time and CPU cycles, so spam becomes less attractive to send to lots of recipients.

So yes, spam volume ought to go down and spammer profits will fall or the cost for the senders will go up.

Eventually they might figure a way to work around holes in this but once we encrypt all email then tweaks to the protocols will be easier next time.

Very Clever Deception

Their not fooling anyone by releasing this so-called "source code". Who pretends to understand this stuff, anyway? We've all seen the movies: the best place to hide something is in plain sight, because that's the last place the so-called "experts" will look!

Re: Ban encryption

They would have to do it on the sly, companies like banks and others that do business online know full well that banning encryption would mean the death of them, so they would be sure to throw their considerable influence to stop any attempt at doing so.

Re:

Cut by their own sword...

Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.

Haha, no shit. It is definitely worth pointing out though that all of this is of the NSA's own making. If they wouldn't have been so cavalier about sucking up data, something like Dark Mail would never have been necessary and they could have continued - status quo.

Key management

Has always been the problem when scaling these things beyond very small groups of people. How are keys exchanged between strangers (new vendor wants a quote, someone asking for support) or even non techies like dear old grandma, ahead of time? Is there instead a central repository for the public keys, if so, who controls it?

Re:

Don't blame Snowden or the Press for the actions of NSA & GCHQ & our Governments, they are the ONLY ones responsible for the crimes they have committed ! ! ! See USC Title 18 Sec. 241 & 242. So why no arrest warrants for high crimes, but only for misdemeanors ? ? ?

High crimes = NSA + GCHQ + PUBLIC OFFICALS OF THE UK& US ! ! !

Misdemeanors = Snowden, Manning, Assange, lAVABIT

REMEMBER: POLITICIANS, BUREAUCRATS AND DIAPERS SHOULD BECHANGED OFTEN AND FOR THE SAME REASON.